Author: Dan Seeger

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Twenty Performances, or Splitting Adams

Dan Seeger

As the banner above makes colorfully clear, this particular annual post is better-suited to make an appearance on Sunday, but that’s reserved for one of our beloved exercises in counting backwards. So instead, we’ll use it as a wrap-up to the extended retrospective on the best cinematic offerings of the calendar year not-so-recently completed. I’ve already rattled off my choices for the ten best films of the year, and here are the performances I’d celebrate if I had the privilege of filling out a nominating ballot issued to a member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acting branch, ranked … Continue reading Twenty Performances, or Splitting Adams

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty-Five

Dan Seeger

#45 — Somebody Up There Likes Me (Robert Wise, 1956) No matter how many times the comparison is invoked by those trying to distract from the damage wrought by the sport, boxing isn’t poetry. It is instead angry prose slammed into place by harshly struck typewriter keys. The definitive cinematic statement of this truth is and will forever be Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, though there are certainly predecessors to that masterpiece that make the same argument with similarly brutish authority, most notably Somebody Up There Likes Me. Based on the autobiography written by middleweight champion Rocky Graziano (with what was … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty-Five

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From the Archive: Welcome to the Monkeyhouse

Dan Seeger

As might be able to predict, these first few weeks of the “From the Archive” feature involve methodically tracking through the various sources from which most future installments are likely to be drawn. My two primary collegiate sources duly covered, it’s time to move ahead a few calendar years. When I was living and working in central Florida, I was lucky enough to be in the orbits of some exceedingly interesting people, including an individual who is the most remarkable manifestation of the word “indefatigable” I’ve ever met. Among the many, many endeavors of my friend Dave was founding and … Continue reading From the Archive: Welcome to the Monkeyhouse

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One for Friday: Steve Carlisle, “WKRP in Cincinnati”

Dan Seeger

Sometimes–often, actually–I miss radio. I don’t solely mean working in radio, though that’s true, too. Twenty-five years ago as I type this, I was in my first year of college, meaning I was in my first year at the college radio station. Around this point in the year, I’d just been elected to serve in my first position on the executive staff, a vital part of my higher ed journey that itself would represent four-and-a-half years of diverse, exhausting, challenging, exciting, gratifying work. From there I went to commercial radio for a time, learning just enough to realize it was … Continue reading One for Friday: Steve Carlisle, “WKRP in Cincinnati”